Today's Google Doodle honors (what would have been) the 107th birthday of Grace Hopper.
A Ph.D. in mathematics, Grace Hopper left teaching at Vassar at the age of 37 to join the navy to help in the war effort for World War II. The navy put her to work on the Mark I at Harvard, one of the world's first computers and she became one of the world's first programmers. At the time programming was done by entering in the computer's native code -- pure numbers.
She developed one of the world's first "compilers" which translate human readable code into computer machine language. That work would lead her to head up the development of COBOL, for COmmon Business-Oriented Language. (FORTRAN, for FORmula TRANslation, a mathematical programming language, was developed around the same time and the two vie for the title of "first computer compiler.")
COBOL is still used in the financial industry and you can buy Visual COBOL today for use with Microsoft's Visual Studio.
She retired a Rear Admiral at age 60 after which she went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) another pioneer computer company.
She was a great mathematician and computer scientist who did amazing things in a "man's world."
Google bringing her to mind lead me to do a little nestalgia searching. Which lead to an interview she did with David Letterman.
At about 2:35 she comments about joining the navy and makes the comment, "There was a time when everybody in this country all did one thing together."
"Good Old Days," indeed.
The whole interview is a fun watch. Happy Birthday, Grace Hopper!